Andry Tanoto

Analysis and design of human-robot swarm interaction in firefighting

In a variety of emergency settings robot assistance has been identified as highly valuable, providing remote, and thus safe, access and operation. There are many different forms of human-robot interactions, allowing a team of humans and robots to take advantage of skills of each team member. A relatively new area of research considers interactions between human and a team of robots performing as a swarm. This work is concerned with the interactive use of autonomous robots in fire emergency settings. In particular, we consider a swarm of robots that are capable of supporting and enhancing fire fighting operations co-operatively and we investigate how firefighters in the field work with such a swarm. This paper outlines some of the key characteristics of this emergency setting. It discusses possible forms of interactions with swarm robotics being examined in the GUARDIANS project. The paper addresses the use of assistive swarm robotics to support firefighters with navigation and search operations. It reports on existing firefighters operations and how human-swarm interactions are to be used during such operations. The design approaches for human-swarm interaction are described and the preliminary work in the area are outlined. The paper ends by linking current expertise with common features of emergency related interaction design.

Teleworkbench: A Teleoperated Platform for Multi-Robot Experiments

This paper describes the Teleworkbench system, a teleoperated platform for managing experiments in multi-robotics. This testbed is intended as a benchmark tool for managing and analyzing experiments involving one or many minirobots. The Teleworkbench is connected to the internet to allow easy access for remote users located in any part of the world. Three unique features of our testbed are the ability to download a user-defined program for each robot, the support for running 36 robots simultaneously, and the visualization of occurring events during the experiments.

Teleworkbench: A Teleoperated Platform for Experiments in Multi-robotics

Robot development is a highly complex and interdisciplinary process. It comprises several phases: design, implementation, as well as test and validation to name some of them. In test and validation, simulation is commonly used. However, experiments with real robots still have a very important role since simulations cannot accurately model the real environment and, as a result, produce inconclusive results [1]. Performing robotic experiments, however, is considerably tedious. It is a repetitive process consisting of several steps: setup, execution, data logging, monitoring, and analysis. Moreover, it also requires a lot of resources especially in the case of experiments in multi-robotics.

FaceBots: robots utilizing and publishing social information in facebook

Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and publish social information available on the web (Facebook). Our main underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that they can co-refer to (“shared memories”), and if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they both know and encounter (“shared friends”). In this paper, we are presenting such a robot, which as we will see achieves two significant novelties.

Teletesting: Path planning experimentation and benchmarking in the Teleworkbench

Experimental evaluation of navigation algorithms requires physical robots as well as position sensing devices. The common alternative is to use simulations to run the experiments. However, simulation often does not provide an accurate prediction of real-world behavior. Therefore, in this paper, we present an innovative approach towards evaluation of navigation algorithms, which does not need physical robots and position sensors to be present at the experimenters site, but relies on a special remote internet-accessible physical testbed, the “Teleworkbench”, which can be used in order to evaluate as well as uniformly cross-compare algorithms with no need of spending money on hardware or simulation software. More specifically, in this paper we are using the Teleworkbench to evaluate three different path planning algorithms, and compare it with simulation. Different metrics are proposed, such as the path execution time, smoothness and path clearance deviations. Our results clearly illustrate the superiority of the Telework-bench as an evaluation platform in comparison to simulation, which does not provide an accurate prediction of actual physical performance, and thus illustrate both the viability as well as the power of our novel approach.

Teleworkbench: An Analysis Tool for Multi-Robotic Experiments

This paper presents a tool, one component of the Teleworkbench system, for analyzing experiments in multi-robotics. The proposed tool combines the video taken by a web cam monitoring the field where the experiment runs and some computer generated visual objects representing important events and information as well as robots’ behavior into one interactive video based on MPEG-4 standard. Visualization and data summarization enables the developer to quickly grasp a situation, whereas the possibility of scrolling through the video and selectively activating information helps him analyzing interesting events in depth. Because of the MPEG-4 standard used for the output video, the analysis process can be done in a wide range of platforms. This trait is beneficial for education and research cooperation purposes.1

FaceBots: social robots utilizing facebook

Summary form only given. Although existing robotic systems are interesting to interact with in the short term, it has been shown that after some weeks of quasi-regular encounters, humans gradually lose their interest, and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships are not established. An underlying hypothesis driving the proposed project is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that they can co-refer to, and if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they both know and encounter frequently. Thus, here we propose to use Facebook, a highly successful online networking resource for humans, towards enhancing longer-term human-robot relationships, by helping to address the above two prerequisites. As a starting point, we utilize social information in order to personalize human-robot dialogues, and to include references to past encounters and to encounters with friends within dialogues. A robot equipped with a modular software architecture (with IPC-intercommunicating modules for face recognition, a simple dialog system, a navigation subsystem, and a real-time Facebook connection/local social database) has been deployed, and is encountering humans in the environment of our lab. An early demonstration of a basic form of such encounters is shown in the submitted video. The system is expected to achieve two significant novelties: arguably being one of the first robots to be embedded in a social web, and being the first robot that can purposefully exploit and create social information that is available online. Furthermore, it is expected to provide empirical support for our main driving hypothesis, that the formation of shared episodic memories within a social web can lead to more meaningful long-term human-robot relationships.

Effect of global position information in unknown world exploration - A case study using the Teleworkbench

This paper presents empirical results of the effect of the global position information on the performance of the modified local navigation algorithm (MLNA) for unknown world exploration. The results show that global position information enables the algorithm to maintain 100% success rate irrespective of initial robot position, movement speed, and environment complexity. Most mobile robot systems accrue an odometry error while moving, and hence need to use external sensors to recalibrate their position on an ongoing basis. We deal with position calibration to compensate the odometry error using the global position information provided by the Teleworkbench, which is a teleoperated platform and test bed for managing experiments using mini-robots. In this paper we demonstrate how we incorporate the global position information during and after the experiments.

Multi-Robot System Validation: From Simulation to Prototyping with Mini Robots in the Teleworkbench

One challenging aspect in the development of multi-robot systems is their validation in a real environment. However, experiments with real robots are considerably tedious as experimenting is repetitive and consists of several steps: setup, execution, data logging, monitoring, and analysis. Moreover, experiments also require many resources especially in the case when involving many robots. This paper describes the role of the Teleworkbench as a platform for conducting experiments involving mini robots. The Teleworkbench offers functionality that can help users in validating their robot software from simulation to prototyping using mini robots. A traffic management system is used as a scenario for demonstrating the support of the Teleworkbench for validating multi-robot systems.